Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in the USA and worldwide causing 160,000 and 1.5 million deaths per year, respectively. Due to the late stage of diagnosis, poor efficacy of chemotherapies (targeted and pleiotropic), and...

Production of fuel ethanol from cellulosic materials is a potentially attractive way to meet sustainability, energy security, and environmental goals. However, the high cost of processing using current technology has thus far prevented...

Thermodynamics, and the classic balance between entropy and enthalpy, provides a proverbial zoo of exotic phase behaviour that chemists can harness to create new materials out of simple liquids and polymers. The diversity of self-assembling...

Fluorescence molecular imaging will have an important clinical impact in the area of guided oncology surgery, where emerging technologies are poised to provide the surgeon with real-time molecular information to guide resection, using targeted...

Studies presented in this dissertation focus on the transcriptional targets and cellular functions of [Delta]Np63[alpha], the predominant TP63 isoform expressed in epithelial stem cell compartments. TP63, a member of the p53 family of...

The Casimir force arises from an alteration of boundary condition in vacuum and is often regarded as a manifestation of quantum zero point energy. Considerable progress has been made in the last decade with an impressive achievement of experimental...

The Internet has become a virtual place where people not only operate in isolation but also interact with other Internet users. Collaborative systems are becoming more popular. Applications now being introduced could provide better remote education...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a virulent opportunistic pathogen that is frequently cultured from infectious sites, and is estimated to cause ~12% of nosocomial infections worldwide [1]. P. aeruginosa infections occur in a majority of adults with the...

Proteins are ubiquitous in cells and are essential to a wide range of biological processes. Since existing proteins occupy only a small portion of the space of possible amino acid composition, understanding their sequence-structure-function...

Quantitative Risk Analysis of Computer Networks (QSRA) addresses the problem of risk opacity of software in networks. It allows risk managers to get a detailed and comprehensive snapshot of the constitutive software on the network, assess its risk...

Medical imaging methods have become increasingly important in diagnosing diseases and assisting therapeutic treatment. In particular, early detection of breast cancer is considered as a critical factor in reducing the mortality rate of women....

While Cherenkov emission was discovered more than eighty years ago, the potential applications of imaging this during radiation therapy have just recently been explored. With approximately half of all cancer patients being treated by radiation at...

I investigated the effects of two contemporary disturbances to soil systems: forest clearing in the northeastern U.S. and climate-driven plant succession in the Arctic. To test the effects of clear-cutting forests on mineral soil carbon (C)...

Sponges are a historically ambiguous taxon, often considered primitively simple representatives of early Metazoa, living fossils from the era before the complex morphological features of the bilaterian phyla appeared in the Cambrian. Yet recent...

Boundary integral methods have long been used to solve boundary value problems for elliptic partial differential equations with piecewise constant coefficients, since they have several numerical advantages over conventional volume discretization....

Many kinds of cancer, and almost universally metastatic cancer, are refractory to treatment by conventional methods: surgery, radiation, and non-specific cytotoxic chemotherapy. The dawn of the age of personalized medicine presaged 15 years ago...

Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular pathogen that is able to survive in a range of hosts due to its repertoire of secreted effector proteins. Utilizing the type I and type II Δku80 strains we engineered a collection of targeted knockout...

Understanding mercury (Hg) and lead (Pb) accumulation and retention in forest soils is needed to reduce their negative impacts on human and wildlife health. In addition, mercury and lead can be used to characterize the role of soil in terrestrial...

Despite immunogenicity, melanoma-specific vaccines have demonstrated minimal clinical efficacy in patients with established disease, but enhance survival when administered in the adjuvant setting. It has been shown that T cell infiltration of...

Identifying the determinants of reproductive success in small-scale societies is critical for understanding how natural selection has shaped human evolution and behavior. The available evidence suggests that status-accruing behaviors such as...

Genome sequencing technology has enabled the identification of genetic variants that are linked with cancer phenotypes, whether these are somatically acquired mutations or common inherited single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Whereas coding...

All cells must organize their cytoplasm in order to carry out functions properly and survive in different environments, and the requirement for organization is increased in large, multinucleate cells. It has long been known that membrane-bound...

While plant-plant interactions define community patterns in alpine tundra around the world, topography and elevation and the resulting physical changes that occur when moving down-slope play a greater role in community formation and maintenance in...

The identification of molecular alterations present in cancer is critical to better understand carcinogenesis as well as the clinical trajectories of patients with malignant tumors. Early detection and application of appropriate treatment...

An important mode of stabilization of cations in biochemical reactions is interaction with the π systems-of aromatic residues. As part of an investigation of the interaction of carbocations with aromatic π systems, a study of various model...

Background. It is not clear whether a generic quality-of-life instrument can appropriately represent severe mental illness in an economic evaluation. This problem is particularly salient for resource-allocation decisions where policymakers compare...

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) balance self-renewal with the continuous production of the suitable numbers of lineage-restricted progenitor cells. In this work we demonstrate that the Mixed lineage leukemia 1 (Mll1) gene is essential for this...

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that manages inter-domain routing on the Internet lacks security. Protective measures using public key cryptography introduce complexities and costs. To support authentication and other security functionality in...

Pervasive computing leads to an increased integration between the real world and the computational world, and many applications in pervasive computing adapt to the user's context, such as the location of the user and relevant devices, the presence...

Whom we e-mail, where we browse, what we purchase, and the things we search for on the World Wide Web all leave identifiable traces of who we are as individuals. In today's technology focused landscape, cyberspace represents the new environment in...